I was in your shoes about 2 weeks ago. I also learned vi first and have been using it regularly for a couple of years now but was curious about emacs. At home, I installed spacemacs which uses vi keybindings. For work due to some security stuff I went with vanilla emacs, with evil mode installed (evil also adds vi keybindings).
I spent 2 evenings picking it up and getting my dot files in order. I primarily wanted to use org mode and only use it for that at the moment, I’m still using vi for coding because of a vimrc that lets me navigate the code base at work really easily but org mode has made task tracking a joy and also it auto-prepares my agenda based on my org file. All in all, I’d say it’s a worth a shot and you also get to keep vi keybindings, which is nice.
Thanks, I might give that a shot. I just installed vim-orgmode to see if I could get a little emacs goodness in vimland. I usually use a custom markup language and vim syntax definitions to keep track of my notes, so this may get me to convert my notes to org mode.
The thing I'm most excited about is shell-mode. For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window. From what I hear, emacs can handle that.
> For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window.
NeoVim is 100% compatible and has a pretty decent terminal buffer with full (read-only) Vim controls. Nowadays I prefer running it in a terminal multiplexer though.
Emacs' terminal mode doesn't have ncurses support which leads to pretty much all interactive terminal applications to break.
I tried all 3 terminals I could find and none works. Apparently they all use the same ancient base that was developed before interactive terminal UIs were a thing.
You might want to update your vim installation and check out `:help terminal`.
One thing I learned last year is to keep all my notes in markdown. I don't like it, I prefer my own markup, but many apps support it, which increases its usefulness a lot.
I spent 2 evenings picking it up and getting my dot files in order. I primarily wanted to use org mode and only use it for that at the moment, I’m still using vi for coding because of a vimrc that lets me navigate the code base at work really easily but org mode has made task tracking a joy and also it auto-prepares my agenda based on my org file. All in all, I’d say it’s a worth a shot and you also get to keep vi keybindings, which is nice.